How To Start A Digital Marketing Agency in 2022

All right. So today we're going to talk about how to start a digital marketing agency. So you've decided it's time to go off on your own, or you could be working full-time somewhere and you want to get going on doing, well, a digital marketing agency because the cash flows are great and you can do a lot with those cash flows. You can choose to reinvest into other areas such as your business, or maybe find other opportunities as well. I have an agency called Single Grain, and through that agency, actually, we were able to parlay the cash flows from that business into, well, other projects within the business or finding other opportunities, right? Other more exponential or more durable sources of, of revenue. I think it's a great model because you look at it, it's basically your, your funding mechanism every single year if you come across interesting opportunities. And so I think the goal here, if you're starting out, is you want to aim for your first $100K, or if you're working somewhere, you want to aim to replace the current salary that you're at right now. If you're able to do that, then great, you can finally quit. The best thing you can do is You start the agency when you're working full-time somewhere. Ideally, your place lets you work on a side hustle while you're working full-time. And we certainly at Single Grain, we actually encourage that. We encourage people to have side hustles because whatever learnings they get from their side hustles, they will translate it over to one of the companies that we have that they're working for. A lot of people are like, oh, you know, it's not good to let people have side hustles. It's a distraction. You know, people are going to be people and you might as well maximize kind of, you know, what they're doing and encourage people to do that. Right. And if their side hustle turns out great, You know, they're gonna quit anyway, so let them go do it. Let them go do something amazing, right? By the way, I did this before. I was working at a company and they found out that I was trying to start this digital agency, which was not competitive to the company. I was working at a media company and one of the leads reached out to the front desk and then I got fired. And then from there, I just went all in on the agency. While I was working the full-time job, I was reaching out to my Dream 100. So there's this book called The Ultimate Sales Machine by the late Chet Holmes, and it talks about this Dream 100. These are the top 100 people that you want to work with. So, you know, every day I was trying to get a little closer, a little closer, just reaching out to people. I would use— back then it was called data.com, and then now you can use a website like hunter.io to find, you know, emails and find— you can use LinkedIn to find titles. You can also reach out to people on LinkedIn as well. But my main thing was I was reaching out to people while I had the safety net of my full-time job. I was answering questions on Quora. You know, things have changed, right? There are different online communities now. There are Facebook groups. You can make YouTube videos. LinkedIn organic reach is great. These are the things that I would be using now to try to prospect. So I'd be creating content while I'm kind of spearing people, right? So aiming for people on my Dream 100 list, maybe it's VPs of marketing or maybe it's CEOs that I want to be working with. You got to figure out first, you know, what is your niche? Who are the types of clientele that you, that you do really well with? You're creating some content on LinkedIn, which where organic reach is very strong. Maybe you might be doing some YouTube as well. What I would say is if you're going to start creating content, Pick one channel first. Don't try to do too many because it's going to take you probably 2 to 3 years to compound. You know, LinkedIn, you might be able to, you know, strike lightning in a bottle because organic reach is great. You stick with one content channel first and understand that it's going to take time to build that up. And then the other thing I would do is maybe every single day you're reaching out to 5, 10, 15 people or so, and maybe you're making a video on Loom. So it's L-O-O-M, and you can use Loom to make a quick 2 to 3 minute, 5 minute screencast Saying, hey, these are the three things I found wrong with your site. Let me know if you'd like to chat about it, right? And then maybe the what you're sending in the email subject line is three issues with your site because people are always like if I'm a CEO, it's like oh there's issues on my site. Boom! They would forward it to someone else, the relevant person on their team because they want to be fixing the issues on the site. So you have a good headline. You have you know three minutes, five minutes showing that you've done the work and you're doing this as much as you can, right? To to build up your clientele. In the early days, you kind of charge whatever you can. We're talking about getting to your first one hundred k, right? So Maybe you're charging, could be $1,000 a month, $2,000 a month, $3,000 a month. And then as you get bigger and bigger, you can start to charge more and more. You know, you can just start to charge $10,000 a month, $15,000, $20,000 a month, $50,000 a month, right? You know, we've talked about creating content. We've talked about reaching out to people, but also get listed on these other websites, these digital marketing websites. Get listed on Upwork, get listed on freelancer.com, get listed on marketerhire.com. These are all job marketplaces where they'll kind of pair you with people looking for— people that are looking for marketing help, they'll be looking for you, right? And start building your reviews up. You can use clutch.co. That's where you can list your agency as well. That's an agency directory. There's a whole host of things you can be doing, but I think being proactive, controlling the things that you can control, put out one piece of content, right? Try to go for every single day. Try to reach out to a couple of people, set number every single day, right? That's output that you can control and eventually the numbers will fall in your favor and just understand that, hey, to take a lot more pressure off of you, ideally if you have a full-time job, you're doing this after your full-time job to build the agency up. And your goal is to get to that $100K. Just understand too, when you're, when you're doing deals, when you're trying to close deals, that every no brings you closer to a yes, right? Don't feel down. Um, use it as fuel, use it as energy to get stronger and stronger. I think also understanding that your network is your net worth, being part of virtual networks or being part of in-person networks. I'm in a lot of different communities. I go to the TED conference every single year and that's great. You know, very high level people that attend. I'm in entrepreneur groups like Entrepreneurs Organization, YPO, you know, mastermind talks. I also throw my own groups as well. We have a group called the Growth Accelerator, which is a peer group where it's 7 and 9-figure entrepreneurs. So my point of telling you this is that that's always been important to me, hanging out with like-minded people, you know, throwing dinners, things like that. Even when I had no network at all and I didn't really have a lot of experience, I would throw dinners at my house. I'd pay for dinner. Sometimes I couldn't even afford to pay for dinner, right? Get a group of people together. You know, we all learn, we put each other on the hot seat and we learn, right? And now you have the advent of Twitter Spaces, of Clubhouse, a lot of different drop-in audio options. It's a great way to do speed networking. To me, it's speed relationship building, right? So understand that everything you're gonna be doing in the agency world is really built off of relationships. A lot of agencies I know that don't really do good work, their founders have really good relationships, right? So that's what you want to get good at doing. Even though I'm an introvert, what I do is if I go to a conference, I'll get a group of speakers together and then I'll throw the dinner, right? So every time I go somewhere for a conference, I'll try to get a group of people together and I'll just, I'll just cover the bill. It just makes it a lot easier. And so that, that is stuff that compounds over time. And you just become the connector. You know, relationships last a lifetime. What I would also say is, as you work towards the $100K, maybe you're hiring some help. Maybe you're hiring some freelancers, right? You can go to Upwork, you can go to freelancer.com, the sites I mentioned earlier. You can actually go there too to hire help. A lot of people are looking to also get work. Eventually what you want to do is go from freelancer and then level up all the way to full-timers, because those full-timers are going to be bought in. I'm really just talking about the first $100K here, so I'll make another video Talking about, okay, how you can start an agency, but then take it to 7 figures or so, right? But I'm talking about the first 6 figures right now. It's a lot of work to get to 7 figures, then 8 figures, and then, you know, so on. Just keep playing the game, right? So anyway, if you enjoyed this video, don't forget to check out the next video over here. And, uh, if you're coming from the podcast, don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we will catch you later. Don't forget to hit the like button as well, 'cause it helps us grow. All right, see you later.